One hour north of Los Angeles, the small town of Acton is experiencing a battery energy storage buildout — and quickly becoming the must-watch frontline in the backlash against lithium-ion energy storage systems. The flashpoint: wildfires.
Like many parts of California, Acton has hot summers with heavy winds, putting it at elevated risk of the kind blaze that makes national headlines. Battery storage fires, while rare, are a unique threat, with relatively little data available about them to help regulators or the public understand the risk. People in Acton wondered: Would they really be safe if a wildfire engulfed a battery storage site, or if a battery failure sparked a new conflagration?
When L.A. County blessed the first battery energy storage system project in Acton last year, developers and local fire officials said they were doing everything in their power to ensure the batteries would meet safety standards. Residents were far from convinced.
“This will turn our community into industrial hell and it’ll erase us from the face of the Earth,” Jacqueline Ayer, a member of Acton’s town council, told me. Ayer is helping lead the local fight against the projects.
I’ve now spent more than a month researching the fight in Acton. In the process, I’ve learned how much — or little — we know about when battery energy storage and wildfires mix. We’ll get to that later in this story. To be honest, debunking battery fire risk wasn’t why I spent a month on Acton. It was what happened when the fears took hold.
Feeling they’d been failed by both the regulatory approval process and the court system, the Acton project’s opponents turned to their representative in Washington, House Republican Mike Garcia. Though Garcia can’t do anything to stop this particular project, he can severely hinder future ones: As Heatmap can exclusively report, after lobbying from Acton, Garcia inserted language into the annual funding bill for the Department of Energy that would block it from implementing a new rule designed to expedite permits for federally funded battery projects.
“What we’re hoping is that [with Garcia] being at the federal level, he’ll shed some light to the people at the top,” said Ruthie Brock of the activist group Acton Takes Action, “because if the top becomes informed, it’ll trickle down to local governments.”
This is why the Acton fight is so important — it demonstrates the risk of failing to obtain community buy-in, which can ricochet in ways no one intended. The political and media environments are quick to sensationalize the downsides of renewable energy, creating a tinderbox atmosphere in which small local fights can quickly become national ones.
Fearing a known unknown
On some level, a fight over battery fires going national was inevitable. Across the country, from New York to Washington state, communities are revolting against battery energy storage sites coming to their backyards. Often, those opposed cite the feared threat of fires or explosions.
Fires in battery energy storage systems, a.k.a. BESS, are quite rare. According to what data is available, the number of fires has stayed relatively flat even as deployment has grown drastically. There were fewer than 10 failure events in the U.S. in 2023, and there have been even fewer so far this year.
But when a fire does happen, experts say it can be quite difficult to put out. In some cases, there’s nothing a community can do other than let the blaze run.
“There’s a lack of consensus. There’s a lot of experts out there providing guidance, and that’s something we’re trying to work on with training throughout the country,” Victoria Hutchinson, an engineer with the Fire Protection Research Foundation, told me. “[It’ll] instill some fear in the meantime we figure out the best approach.”
Information on BESS and wildfires is even less available. Guillermo Rein, a professor of fire science and the editor-in-chief of the journal Fire Technology, told me the matter has not really been studied.
“When I say [BESS are] new, I mean really new,” Rein said. “We hardly know how it works when it gets [on] fire and we don’t have many technologies that are proven to work. We have technologies that we wish will work, but proven technologies that work are very rare. That means we have a new hazard we are struggling to understand and in the meantime, we don’t know how to protect against it.”
Parsing what happened in Acton
Los Angeles County approved Acton’s first battery storage system — Humidor, a 300 megawatt project by Hecate Energy — last summer through an expedited “ministerial” process, the local equivalent of a “categorical exclusion” under the National Environmental Policy Act. Ministerial reviews and categorical exclusions are used by regulators to skip the drawn out process of an environmental review because they can reasonably predict a lack of significant impact. Joseph Horvath, a spokesperson for L.A. County Planning, gave me a statement defending the approval and stating BESS projects must meet all local and state zoning and fire codes to receive a ministerial approval.
California had identified the Acton community back in 2021 as a potential site for energy storage to protect against future power shut offs. Acton made sense because it’s close to the SoCal Edison Vincent substation, making it well positioned to connect to the grid. There was also a real sense of urgency: To achieve its goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045, the state estimates it will need to install a projected 52,000 megawatts or more of battery storage. Humidor is the first of what appears to be multiple projects being planned for the area, including two more Hecate facilities according to materials on the company’s website.
Convinced that a battery boom could mix poorly with extreme fire risk, and that the county moved far too fast to approve Humidor, Acton residents sued. The county, they argued, had little reason to conclude the facility would have an insignificant impact on the environment — so few BESS projects have been approved that the county used the standards from a different kind of project — an electrical substation — to draw that conclusion. L.A. County Planning told me they chose this comparison for reasons including the “purpose of BESS and its connection to the larger network for distributive purposes.”
Rein told me that at least when it comes to the fire risk, this isn’t an accurate comparison, and that there’s not actually enough data to claim such a facility would have an insignificant impact. “I would put great efforts into making sure this facility is safe,” he said. “They can’t just say, I met the regulation, I did enough. Because it’s a new hazard.”
Many of those in Acton opposed to the project believe the approval was rushed, and claim that little information was made available to the public as it was going through the county’s process. Furious residents have told county planners that the Acton town council was not notified in advance that an approval was on its way. They testified before the county board of supervisors that Hecate held only a single public meeting to discuss what it intended to build, with little notice given to potentially concerned citizens.
Obtaining a social license
In my experience as a journalist reporting on large energy projects with serious community impacts, transparency is key to getting local buy-in to build a project. For years I covered the mining industry, where innumerable decades of toxic waste spills and labor scandals have forced companies to really innovate and spend serious dough on obtaining “social license to operate,” a term developers and investors use to describe acceptance to a company’s business practices.
This, of course, differs from the YIMBY school of thought that companies and governments should eschew frustrated municipalities to pursue the overriding net good of climate action. There are certainly merits to this argument, especially when it comes to communities that won’t take yes for an answer, and we’ll be exploring case studies supporting that view in future editions of The Fight.
I’m on the fence about whether Acton is one of those cases, though. Ayer, an environmental engineer by trade, told me she supports decarbonization and wants to see climate action happen. She just wants to feel assured the technology is safe.
If it wasn’t a lithium-ion battery storage facility “I would feel comfortable,” she said. “We will shoulder some of the weight. But it isn’t right that we shoulder all of the weight.”
When I tried to talk to Hecate about Acton’s wildfire concerns and how the company had engaged with the community, a company spokesperson, Bobby Howard, declined to make anyone available for an interview citing “ongoing litigation related to the subject.” Howard provided a factbook that said only that Humidor would “meet or exceed” local and state fire codes — without specifying which codes — and detailed some of the outreach the company did, including the public meeting as well as mailers to “thousands of individuals throughout the greater Los Angeles area, including civically engaged individuals throughout Acton.”
Howard declined to answer questions requesting more information about the company’s public outreach and wildfire planning. He did tell the Los Angeles Times earlier this year that Humidor would have “seismic bracing, safety zones around the perimeter, substantial setbacks from parcel boundaries, gravel breaks and a masonry wall around the facility.”
Stanford University senior research scholar and legal energy expert Michael Wara explained to me that in cases like these, having buy-in from the community is important to avoiding litigation and social blowback. “That is losing,” Wara said. “You have not served your client if you end up in litigation.”
“Having a process by which people are informed about a project and have an opportunity to provide input is important for buy-in for all kinds of projects related to the energy transition if you want to build in a democratic society,” he said. “Is it really the fire risk the community is concerned about?”
Fire is the new whales
When it comes to the Acton battery fight, it’s the fears of fire that scare me the most, not the fire itself.
I sought reasons to be optimistic about putting battery energy storage in areas like Acton that are prone to wildfire because, well, California is essentially one big fire risk zone. James Campbell, a wildfire policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, told me that battery energy storage decreases net wildfire risk compared to gas storage tanks and pipelines. “If we consider the whole-climate trade-offs, battery systems are much safer,” he said.
On its end, Hecate claimed in a letter to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors that a BESS fire has never traveled off-site, and that because the fires are fueled by flammable gasses, there is minimal risk of embers traveling elsewhere and igniting grass or bushes. The company pointed me to this letter when I reached out for comment.
“Nothing about fire risk mitigation is about certainty. It’s more, risk mitigation and fire is kind of like wearing a seatbelt,” Wara told me. “If you’re going 120 miles an hour down the highway and you get in a high-speed collision, your seatbelt will not save you. [But] there’s rapid advances in how these systems work.”
In the end, he added, meeting California’s carbon emissions targets will “probably mean building somewhere that there is non-trivial wildfire risk.”
What’s happening to offshore wind should be a cautionary tale for developers considering whether sinking time and money into community relations is really worth it: Last year, coastal fishermen and beach town mayors in New Jersey joined forces with fossil fuel funding and right-wing agitators to foment a conspiracy-infused campaign against offshore wind that has truly rattled the future of the industry.
Part of that offshore wind backlash grew out of New Jersey Republicans in Congress using the pulpit of their offices and filing amendments to legislation. As Garcia takes up Acton’s cause, I do wonder whether battery energy storage might be next. November’s election makes it less likely his language hindering expedited approvals for BESS projects will make it into the final funding bill, and Garcia’s office did not respond to requests to discuss its prospects.
But regardless, it’s an ember that could become a fire of its own.
